Charles LaPorte's ingenious book is a field guide to some seriously weird adulators of Shakespeare, ranging from C. A. Swinburne, whose Sacred and Shakespearian affinities (1890) spliced passages from Richard II and King John into Psalm xxii, to Charles Downing, whose The messiahship of Shakespeare (1901) proposed that Shakespeare realised the second coming of Christ. Their follies prompted George Bernard Shaw to ridicule Victorian ‘Bardolatry’ as a ‘category mistake’ (p. 146), a bad cross of religion and literature. By contrast, LaPorte proposes that ‘bardology’ – as he neutrally defines it – illuminates the staying power of Victorian religion, particularly in the fledgling study of English literature. His primary aim is to convince contemporary literary scholars that many of the assumptions of their discipline still betray a ‘hidden theology’ not far from the vanished faith of bardology, one which might even be the ‘condition for certain kinds of interesting hermeneutics’ (p. 145). Historians though might learn from LaPorte's distinctively literary approach to assessing the persistence of Victorian religion, which locates it in resilient ‘discursive formations’ (p. 35), rather than in head counts of believers or taxonomies of beliefs (p. 9). LaPorte follows Charles Taylor in refusing to tell the story of secularisation as a ‘subtraction narrative’ (p. 146). As consensus over the grounds of faith fragmented, religion did not so much disappear as migrate into a new ‘cultural dynamic’ (p. 146). Pressures on faith thus changed the Romantic reverence for Shakespeare into something rich and strange. The claim that the First Folio was a fifth gospel appropriated traditional scriptural hermeneutics, but was also an Anglophone response to the belated circulation of German doubts about the authority of the Scriptures. LaPorte begins his treatment of this appropriation with ‘bald substitutions’ (p. 31): sermons preached on Shakespeare or Lady Macbeth, or devotional books which set scriptural passages opposite nuggets from the sonnets or the plays, asserting thereby that these were two parallel authorities. If his compilers now look reckless in their decontextualisation of Shakespeare, then they were handling his plays as many pre-critical readers of the Bible did in making catenas of proof texts. Importantly, LaPorte's argument here is not limited to spotting the Christianity of devout Shakespearians, many but not all of whom were clergymen. It rather depends on understanding even the craziest bardologists as outcrops of ‘cultures of quotation’ (p. 154) which were not just the bedrock of nineteenth–century Christian practice but linger in modern literary studies every time a part is taken as a synecdoche of the whole. Bardology was thus ‘structurally theological’ (p. 143): it was not the ghost in the machine, but the machine of learning itself. This emerges in a discussion of the New Shakspeare Society, whose founder F. J. Furnivall regarded ecclesiastical Christianity as bunk but remained a Protestant philologist in his obsession with reconstituting Shakespeare's corpus. Conversely, Algernon Charles Swinburne was an atheistic pagan, but none the less attacked Furnivall as a sceptical German professor in terms that recalled diatribes against the Tübingen School. It is sometimes unclear how far LaPorte wishes to push his genealogical claims. In a riveting chapter on the aptly named ‘Baconian heresy’, he suggests that David Friedrich Strauss's scepticism about the Gospels generated the hermeneutics of suspicion with which Baconians approached Shakespeare's authorship of the plays. Yet here and elsewhere he also writes as if bardology merely ‘dovetail[s]’ (p. 103), ‘mirror[s]’ or ‘emerges in conjunction with’ (p. 122) higher critical debates – a parallelism which suggests that literary studies behaved like a theology, but not that it was or derived from one. Many of LaPorte's neatest examples of the theology of bardology also appear to have been little read or appreciated in their time: not least, Richard Chevenix Trench's inaudible tercentenary sermon at Stratford, of which only the word ‘Shakespeare’ (p. 35) reached the audience. By contrast, to claim even non-believers for the cult of English literature is to stamp the great code of biblical thinking at such a deep level that it becomes difficult to explain how the humanities could ever have got free from it. LaPorte himself is happy to usher theology from the bardologist's pulpit to the university professor's chair, but historians may struggle to reconcile this book's compelling theory of the conservation of religious energy with what they know of the institutional dimensions and social realities of religious decline.